Tag Archives: Carl Jung

Sally Gross, the acclaimed minimalist avant-garde dancer and choreographer, passed away last week at the age of eighty-one. If you’ve never seen one of Sally’s live performances, you might have seen her in the 1959 “beat” film Pull My Daisy (together with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac) or in the 2007 documentary, The Pleasure of Stillness, that noted filmmaker Albert Maysles made about her work. Sally was the friend of a friend, and I’d the good fortune to see her dance live over a decade ago at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio. I also had the good fortune to have Sally accompany me on a journey five hours up to and five hours back from Toni Packer’s Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry where we’d gone together on a seven-day silent retreat.

Sally wasn’t in the best of moods for our trip. Her long-term boyfriend, art dealer Richard Bellamy, had passed away in 1998, and if I remember correctly, there had been some dissension between Sally and his family in the wake of his death. While my memory about the particulars is somewhat fuzzy, I distinctly remember Sally as still actively angry and grieving a she talked about Richard all the way up to Springwater. At the time of his passing, Richard served as an art dealer for the work of only one artist, the abstract expressionist sculptor Mark di Suvero. I wasn’t familiar with di Suvero’s work, but I’d learned of his existence only a few months earlier when he received a Governor’s Art Award from New York Governor George Pataki in an impressive ceremony alongside the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Temple of Dendur

I happened to be there because noted photographer Milton Rogovin, the father of a friend, was also receiving an award that night.Mark di Suvero gave a memorable acceptance speech that made a lasting impression on me, and as a consequence, when Sally mentioned his name, the name meant something to me. At the time I thought it was interesting — I’d never heard of di Suvero before, and here he’d “turned up” twice in just a matter of a few months. Life’s funny that way. I decided that I’d have to familiarize myself with his work once I got home.As a curious aside, di Suvero’s name came up for me once more a decade later when my daughter completed an artist’s residency at his Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City.

On the road back from Springwater, Sally told me that her entire retreat experience had been permeated, haunted, and dominated by Richard’s “presence.”She spent the entire week processing her complex feelings about their relationship and his death. We were still caught up in talking about this when I noticed with some alarm that I’d missed my exit off Route 17 where it intersected with Route 84. I had gone to Springwater several times in the past, and had never missed my exit before!

I got off the next exit, and rather than doubling back, tried making my way to Route 84 along some back roads.Along one of those roads, we passed a country inn. The Inn was familiar to Sally —she and Richard had stayed there once and she reminisced with me about it.A little further along, we found ourselves passing the Storm King Art Center — an outdoor sculpture garden which I had never seen before — and Sally began pointing out an impressive series of giant di Suvero sculptures that were clearly visible from our car along the length of the road. Suddenly, missing my exit didn’t seem a mistake, but deeply connected in some mysterious way to Sally’s unrequited grief, as if Richard’s ghost was somehow guiding us.

di Suvero sculptures at Storm King Art Center

Psychiatrist Carl Jung coined a word for these kinds of seemingly meaningful coincidences — synchronicity — by which he meant temporally coincident occurrences of acausally connected events. Jung thought that events could be meaningfully connected through some principle of simultaneity distinct from the usual connectivity of sequential cause-and-effect. He believed that meaningful coincidences like these revealed something profound about the deep structure of the universe — something akin to the “spooky action at a distance“ in quantum entanglement.In Synchronicity (1952), Jung provided an example of synchronicity at work in psychotherapy:

Psychiatrist Carl Jung

“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewelry. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.”

Of course, skeptics will dismiss this as “just coincidence.” In a universe with an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, coincidences like these will inevitably appear, but they’re ultimately meaningless.

But then there are stories that seem so remarkable, they seem beyond mere coincidence.Like the time my friend Victoria from Nigeria had the eerie feeling that something awful had happened to her brother back home.Alarmed and disturbed, she called her parents in Nigeria, who assured her all was well. Several days later, however, she received another phone call from her parents.Her brother was dead.Unbeknownst to them, he’d died days earlier in a car accident while far from home — the very day Victoria had first called them. The police had just brought them the news.

The eminent psychologist, Charles Tart, posted one of the most convincing examples of synchronicity I’ve ever read on his T.A.S.T.E. (The Archives of Scientists’s Transcendent Experiences) website.

Psychologist Charles Tart

In 1974, Tart drove to pick up an East Coast psychologist named “Terry” who was visiting Berkeley California and staying at an address at 2924 Benvenue Avenue. They were going to go out for a cup of coffee. As he was driving to pick Terry up, Tart’s mind was suddenly overcome by thoughts of violence:

“…I lost track of what I had been thinking about and instead found myself thinking about bad neighborhoods with criminal gangs in them…. The thought not only persisted, it quickly built into a frightening set of obsessions about being beaten up, about gangs of people with guns, shooting, violence, and the conviction that I would be mistaken for a burglar and shot when I walked between the houses to meet Terry at the kitchen door. I became very frightened and wanted to turn the car around and drive away as fast as possible. The closer I got to Benvenue Avenue, the worse I felt! … I felt intensely ashamed and embarrassed: I had to be crazy to feel like this! There was absolutely no reason for any normal person to feel this way! The psychologist part of my mind diagnosed me as having a paranoid schizophrenic attack of high intensity…”

When he finally reached Benevenue Avenue, Tart searched for a parking space, then walked back to where Terry was waiting for him.

“I was still quite frightened and I looked into every shadow and parked car, and between houses, looking for gangs or an ambush….Much to my relief, Terry was waiting out in front of the house… We said hello, chatted as we walked back to my car, and drove off to a coffee shop…”

Tart didn’t tell Terry about his weird experience.They were still in the process of just getting acquainted, and Tart didn’t want Terry to think he was crazy.A week later, Tart received a letter from Terry, who’d subsequently returned back to the East Coast.In the letter, Terry wrote that he’d had an almost identical paranoid experience to Tart’s while waiting for him to arrive.

“…While he was waiting for me in front of the Institute, he started feeling paranoid, worrying about people with guns and getting shot! He too felt pretty silly and ashamed. He was relieved when I arrived and we left for the coffee shop.”

And then — the most interesting part of Terry’s letter!As it turns out, at the very moment when Tart and Terry were experiencing their simultaneous paranoid episodes, several cars with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were parked alongside Benvenue Avenue. They had already kidnapped mathematician Peter Benenson who was crouched on the floor of one of the vehicles, and they were preparing to kidnap Patty Hearst who lived at 2603 Benvenue:

“…Armed with their automatic rifles and pistols, they went down the walkway between the apartment and the adjoining house that leads to the apartment entrance and knocked. When Patty’s boyfriend, Steven Weed, opened the door, they rushed in, threw him to the floor, and began beating and kicking him. Patty Hearst was grabbed and carried screaming from the house. Weed finally managed to get loose and ran screaming from the apartment, while one of the men kept pointing his rifle at him with a cold smile on his face. A neighbor came to see what was happening: he was grabbed, beaten, and knocked unconscious to the floor, a floor that was already soaked with Steven Weed’s blood. Two women who came out of the next apartment were driven back inside as automatic rifle fire splintered the shingled wall beside them. Patty’s captors threw her in the trunk and fled in Peter Benenson’s car, with Benenson still crouching terrified on the floor, expecting that the next shot would be for him….”

One could perhaps say that Tart’s paranoid episode — one he had never had before or since — was just a panic attack and that its simultaneity with the Hearst kidnapping was mere coincidence, but then how can one account for Tart and Terry having simultaneous paranoid experiences?A skeptic might say that the odds of these things coinciding by chance are infinitesimally small, but that given a nearly infinite universe, coincidences with infinitesimal likelihoods randomly occur from time to time. I personally believe that occurrences like these reflect more than just mere coincidence, however. Whatever their explanation, synchronicity is a good label for them. They point to the incompleteness of the physicalist account of the universe, and remind us to keep our minds open about the ultimate nature of things. They point to a deeper interconnection between events that goes beyond sequential cause-and-effect — the kind of interconnection I’ve written about recently in my postings on Dogen and Whitehead.

In the meantime, here’s a link to Albert Maysles’s film about Sally Gross.